Modern tanks have the time to conduct maintenance which includes wire brushing and painting.
I’m curious to know if that camouflage scheme was ‘by the book’, was visible to an enemy before it saw or heard the tank and whether some kind of ‘strobe’ effect may have been created?
Enquirig minds need to know…
Probably joking but if not
I doubt it scared any Chinese but it probably was a boost in morale for the crew and grunts for a hot second til the rounds came down range.
Only in nightclubs with disco lights 
Probably like the shark mouths on fighter planes… if you look ferocious, you feel it!
1 Like
And beer goggles? 
“Hey you sexy Panther, can I get you a drink?”
“Get stuffed creep, I’m a Tiger!!”
“Sorry luv, I was blinded by the strobing of your non-manual compliant painted wheels”
5 Likes
Your post raises an interesting thought. I’ve watched NatGeo’s doco of this several times, as I’m sure most of us have. Yes the older M1’s came back to Lima & Aniston in a pretty beat up condition - they had, after all, only been through regular depot maintenance in their lives, rather than a 0 miles deeper maintenance facility. When they are rolled out of the paint shop, they’re finished in CARC.
This coating is designed to be resistant to some pretty angry, bad ju-ju stuff, yet I’ve seen models of Abrams where a lot of the Sand coating is worn away. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if this were true in reality, does this not make the tank no longer fit for purpose & therefore U/S, because the integrity of the coating"s protection has been compromised?
I work on military helo’s everyday, which get used A LOT. Yes the paintwork gets UV faded, stained with exhaust contaminants, oil & hyd fluids, but it never chips & the NATO Black wears back in traffic areas to the Sand basecoat. One of the other camo colours has an IR resistant coating in it. If that gets compromised in any way, that a/c is taken offline so the ‘sheeties’ can respray & bake that affected area. Every X days (I can’t remember the maint policy now) it goes in for a wash. When it comes out, it rarely looks any better than it did before the wash - except the ZI400 has got rid of the oil & hyd off the paintwork
3 Likes
Could it be that a lot of what we perceive as chipping in photos is actually the more recent light color paint wearing and the factory darker color showing through?
Paint normally has to be damaged to chip. On my M60A1 there was a section of my back deck that had some paint chips because I used it as an anvil to hammer out bent fenders and the like. The loaders hatch opening area had some chips from ammo cans banging into that area frequently… military paint is not like the paint on my old Dodge truck that just flaked off.
1 Like
It depends on the photo. For example, this photo shows both – you can see rust and wear,but if you look at the road wheels, the first three and last road wheel all show varying amounts of the base green where the sand/tan has worn away, and the spare roadwheel hung from the turret is base green as well. But if the photo were converted to greyscale, it would be difficult to tell what parts are rusty and what parts are just worn down to the base green – the sprocket wheel in the picture shows the sand/tan on the edges and some spots, but is both rusted and showing the base green, so that a B&W photo would hardly be able to tell them apart.
1 Like
What a cracking picture; I normally steer clear of Gulf War subjects (assuming it is Gulf War) but now I might be tempted.
1 Like
And that is a very worn tank!
Ken
As others have noted, modern CARC paint is really durable stuff. Of course, there are plenty of examples where the US military used non-CARC paint - all those Desert Shield/Storm vehicles painted with basically Saudi house paint - and that stuff chips like crazy under operational conditions.
That vehicle is unique to the discussion. Most carc vehicles don’t look like that after MEU deployments as I recall. They might have done more ship to shore transport training leading up to possible combat then most MEU’s. Road wheels where painted sand or green and can be mixed on a vehicle. Lots more details about that tank before and after.
That tank was OIF 2003 Kuwait, not Gulf War 1991.
Roger that Ryan.
1 Like
My understanding was that part of that peeling & chipping of the Saudi paint was due to properties of the CARC paint. The CARC stuff is supposed to repel and prevent any adhesion of another chemical (such as a non CARC paint) over itself. The Saudi paint couldn’t get a “tooth” sunk into the CARC paint surface.
The paint did not have as much of an adhesion problem over the repainted MERDC equipment.
1 Like
The Saudi paint did not chip on my tank, it wore off in high wear areas such as around hatches.
1 Like